UNESCO Chair · University of Groningen
Where Greenmapper works: Man and Biosphere Areas
Greenmapper is the research platform of the UNESCO Chair in Sustainable Landscape Governance, Education and Citizen Science, held by Frans Sijtsma at the University of Groningen. Its working ground is UNESCO’s network of Man and Biosphere Areas.
A UNESCO Chair for landscapes and citizen science
It is the University of Groningen’s first UNESCO Chair, and it studies how people’s attachment to the places they love can be given real weight in decisions about land use, management and protection — and how citizens can take part in that, anywhere in the world.
Man and Biosphere Areas — often called biosphere reserves — are UNESCO’s living laboratories for sustainability: places designated to show that protecting nature and making a living from a landscape can happen in the same place, at the same time.
There are 797 Man and Biosphere Areas, in 145 countries, together covering more than five per cent of the Earth’s land surface. Nine in ten overlap with a Key Biodiversity Area — a large share of the biodiversity the world is trying not to lose sits inside them.
They include the Serengeti–Ngorongoro, the Central Amazon and the Galápagos — and De Maasheggen, a hedgerow landscape along the river Meuse. Size and fame are not the criterion; the way people and nature share the land is.
Serengeti–NgorongoroTanzania
Central AmazonBrazil
GalápagosEcuador
De MaasheggenNetherlands
Photographs, left to right: Diego Delso (CC BY-SA 4.0); Artur Warchavchik (CC BY-SA 3.0); Pete from USA (CC BY-SA 2.0); Chris Peel (CC BY-SA 3.0). Page header: Diego Delso (CC BY-SA 4.0). All via Wikimedia Commons, cropped and resized for the web.
How a biosphere area is built
Each area is designed in three rings, and that design is the whole idea:
- Core — strictly protected. The ecosystem itself, and the yardstick against which everything around it is measured.
- Buffer — research, education, tourism and careful use, all in service of the core.
- Transition — the large outer area where people live, farm and work, and where sustainable development has to prove itself in practice.
Protection and daily life are not kept apart here; they are designed as one landscape. That is what makes these areas difficult to govern — and what makes them worth learning from.
Why capacity building is the bottleneck
UNESCO asks every area to do three things: conserve, develop sustainably, and build capacity. The third is the hardest. Designing protection and livelihoods as one landscape only works if the people who shape that landscape — farmers, ports, municipalities, managers, residents — share a basic understanding of how it works as a whole. That understanding is usually missing: scattered across disciplines, institutions and languages, and rarely assembled for the place itself.
This is where the Chair puts its weight. An open landscape observatory brings what is known about a landscape together in one readable place. And Greenmapper adds something these areas rarely have on record: what people actually value, and where — evidence that has barely counted in decisions so far, even though it is the reason these landscapes are defended at all.
Developed with core partners in China, Brazil, South Africa, Tanzania and Ghana. In the Netherlands the Chair works with Staatsbosbeheer, host of the national coordination point for Man and Biosphere Areas (Coördinatiepunt Mens & Biosfeergebieden), which covers De Maasheggen and Kempen-Broek — the latter shared with Belgium. The Wadden Sea serves as the reference case close to home.
Figures: UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme.
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